Bush has not lived down to expectations

The tradition of assessing presidents at 100 days began with Franklin Roosevelt, who took office in 1933 during the darkest days of the Depression. In 100 days, FDR shored up a collapsing bank system, abandoned the gold standard and pushed 15 significant pieces of legislation through Congress. A formidable yardstick indeed.

But is it fair, as the media here seem determined to do, to use legislative or executive activism as a measure of presidential success? And particularly with a President whose boast was that he wanted Washington to do less, for whom activism is anathema? And what of the plaintive cry from one aide who demanded that the 35 days of the Florida recount should be taken into account?

Nevertheless, the rush to judgment proceeds apace. "It puts a really unnatural pressure on presidents," historian Michael R. Beschloss has observed. "But it's genetically encoded in people who study presidents and write about them."

President Bush has succumbed by inviting all 535 members of Congress over to the White House for lunch on Monday to celebrate his first 100 days. His own verdict, needless to say, is kindly and very Bushesque, a mixture often of the extraordinarily obvious and the naive with a dollop of foot in mouth. On Wednesday he said he felt "pretty darn good" about the job he is doing, citing progress on a tax cut and negotiations with Democrats on his education agenda.

And he told the Washington Post this week that "I am enjoying myself. It's a job that kind of, if part of your life is to keep your dance card full, my dance card's full. And it's really a decision-making job, much more so than people really realise. I make decisions every day - large decisions, small decisions, which is a test of my management skills, and a test of how firm the foundation on which I walk - a test of the foundation on which I walk."

Indeed.

The verdict of others is mixed, as the Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle put it quite well: "I guess I would give him an A-plus for his first 30 days, a B-plus for his second 30 days and a C-minus for his third 30 days, and probably a better grade for his last 10, given the China situation."

In a more partisan mode, the Democratic National Committee chairman, Terry McAuliff, tells audiences that the story of the first 100 days is "not what they've done, but what they've undone," a reference to the reversal by Bush of many of his predecessor's last-minute measures.

The Republican National Committee counters with a chart of 100 Day Benchmarks, showing Bush has made trips to 26 states, while Jimmy Carter had visited seven at that point, Ronald Reagan, two, and George Bush and Bill Clinton, 15 each. But Bush's determination to be seen around the country is also an implied admission that the legitimacy of his election needs to be copper-fastened by public exposure.

The Baltimore Sun reflects the view of many in its assessment. "Perhaps most important," the paper suggests in its review of the 100 days, "he avoided serious blunders and major embarrassments". And there is little doubt that the somewhat kindly view of the President held by the majority - a 63 per cent general approval rating - is the product of relief that he has not lived down to expectations. In Bush's own words: "They misunderestimated me . . . "

The change in the White House is both of style and substance, a presidency that is much more hands-off, preaching civility and bipartisanship, but in practice rules firmly from the right. Working a nine to five day, and much less inclined than his predecessor to hog the limelight, Bush, the first occupant of the White House to hold a Masters in Business Administration, lets others micro-manage crises while he sets the strategic priorities.

But there's no doubt he expects his appointees to be team players and showed his ruthless side with Linda Chavez, his Labour Secretary nominee, when, during the nomination process, she was exposed as having harboured an illegal immigrant.

During the China crisis and even at its end he was seen only when necessary. "Clinton would have been out there with the servicemen, but that's just not President Bush's style," says Jim Brulte, the Republican leader of the California Senate, who is close to the White House. "He's not a grandstander or a showboater."

But such reticence can have its downside, with polls showing as many as 43 per cent believing that other people in his administration are making key decisions that a president should make.

That he should be seen to lean so heavily on his workaholic Vice-President Dick Cheney may cost him dear if, God forbid, the latter succumbs in office to one of his run of heart attacks.

Bush's great political success was to make the Republican Party electable by persuading the public that it was no longer run by the far right. But unlike Clinton, who moved the Democratic Party to the centre ground of politics, there is every reason to believe that Bush's successful rebranding operation, "compassionate conservatism", is more a sleight of hand than a move of substance. In office, Bush is no centrist.

"The surprising thing about George W. Bush," right-wing economist Stephen Moore says, "is that he uses very moderate rhetoric, but governs very conservatively. Most of us thought he was more of a middle of the road Republican, so it's been a very pleasant surprise for people like me. For conservatives he has been a real star."

Not so, says the public. Bush faces real problems in the area where his conservatism has been most nakedly exposed, the environment, where polls show only 47 per cent support, with two-thirds of voters believing him to be doing the bidding of the oil companies.

In a series of moves the administration has declined, for now, to toughen standards for arsenic in drinking water; reneged on a campaign pledge to require power plants to control emissions of carbon dioxide; withdrawn from talks on a global warming treaty; imposed a ban on private lawsuits to add new entries to the endangered species list; suspended a rule controlling toxic runoff from mining sites; decided to consider allowing the construction of new roads through 58 million acres of forest land; floated a plan to drill oil wells in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency budget by 6.4 per cent and taken steps that could abolish the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Other actions are in the works.

Then there's the energy plan, soon to emerge from a committee led by Dick Cheney, which is certain to stress production over conservation. And the President even appears to be heading for a row with his brother, Jeb, the governor of Florida, over proposals to allow drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Such explicit support for business interests over those of consumers could hurt the Republicans. "Environmental issues matter most in the suburbs," says Representative Tom Davis, who heads the Republicans' House campaign committee. "People see a clean environment as part of the good life they moved to the suburbs to find."

Where he has been most successful as President, on the other hand, has undoubtedly been on foreign policy, with polls showing 63 per cent approval, courtesy of a low-key, non-confrontational approach to the EP-3, the unfortunate spy plane crisis, clearly driven by the diplomats at Colin Powell's State Department.

BUT A LONGER perspective may not be so kind to the President. In three months he has antagonised allies by repudiating Kyoto, alarmed Russia by pressing ahead with plans for missile defence, cut the feet from the Korean peace process with Cold War rhetoric about the North, and reignited the row with China with an explicit pledge to defend Taiwan from aggression. This is from a man who pledged a "humble" foreign policy.

To see the Bush conduct of the China crisis as a sign of inherent moderation is profoundly wrong, one speaker argued recently at a seminar in the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy think-tank. On the contrary, he said, moderates in the administration may well have exhausted a lot of political capital in the exercise.

Like Reagan, Bush has tried to pick a number of big themes for his first year - tax cuts, pay increases for the army, a major literacy drive and financial support by the state for faith-based welfare programmes.

With the exception of the army pay issue, each of them has proved major battlegrounds with an evenly divided Congress. On Thursday for the first time he admitted he will have to make serious concessions in scaling back his 10-year tax cut programme from $1.6 trillion - 43 per cent of which will go to the richest 1 per cent in America - to closer to the Senate's $1.2 trillion. Agreement on education has only been possible by jettisoning the President's cherished voucher schemes.

The Senate, divided 50-50, has discovered the power of bipartisanship, a Bush catchcry, but, ironically, not with the White House, but against it. Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold united across the floor to push through their own priority, campaign finance reform, and to present Bush with a Bill to sign which he despises but may find politically impossible to veto.

And the faith-based welfare plans have brought the wrath of the evangelical right, Bush's political heartland, down on the programme. Unwilling to distinguish their proselytising from their assistance to the needy, many of the white Protestant churches may be found ineligible for assistance because of the constitutional prohibition on state support for religion.

But the biggest unanswered question yet is that which fills many here with the deepest sense of foreboding. What will he do to the Supreme Court? The appointment of arch-conservative John Ashcroft to the Attorney General's job signalled a strong empathy with the agenda of the conservative right on issues like abortion and states' rights, but the test will come with the expected imminent resignation of a member of the court.

More than almost any other, that nomination gives Mr Bush the power to shape not just this generation's but the next generation's America.